they afford us no vivid experience whatsoever. An
artist stands self-condemned if his interpretation fails to correspond
with that outward life to which our senses are a sufficient guide.

Indeed we have already demanded, as a self-evident axiom, that the
artist should afford us a vivid experience, and that which directly
contradicts the truth of common sense can produce no experience except
that of confusion or disgust. It belongs to the first rudiments of
art--the mere grammar--that an artist's convictions, as bodied forth
in sense-given symbols, should not palpably and shockingly contradict
the conditions of the sensible world; his is the far more difficult
and delicate task of expressing himself, not by violation, but by
selection, emphasis, reconstruction. The penalty he must pay if he
refuses these terms is that of being unintelligible.

But granted that the artist has obeyed this law, which is obvious to
the majority of the sane, we further demand from him that his work
should be "sincere," that is to say, that it should be consistent with
his own clearest conceptions, his most urgent convictions, his most
penetrating intuitions--in a word, consistent with that central thing
which I have called the kernel of his personality. An artist is in
this sense insincere whenever, for example, he inserts anything in his
work which exists solely for the sake of convention--some of
Shakespeare's clown scenes were often put in solely because an
Elizabethan audience demanded them, and they were to that extent a
truckling to convention, an insincerity. They do not express the real
Shakespeare. Any artist not capable of entirely direct and spontaneous
expression (and probably no great art was ever completely spontaneous)
must make up his mind about himself, about what is temperamentally
real in him, about that which is his primary _raison d'etre_; and in
accordance with, and out of this kernel of himself he must interpret
all that he touches. By this means alone can he introduce order, form,
unity into the indeterminate chaos of life. By this means alone can
life assume coherent shape under his hands, and it is coherence and
shape which alone can give us the impression of beauty, of that
coherent shapeliness of matter drawn into the semblance of a living
organism.

It may be a very simple unity, this microcosm of art, like a cell
compounded from protoplasm, yet it will give us its corresponding
pleasure, so long as it is mad